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I recently worked on an enterprise-level client’s non-SEO related project where the goal was to confirm or deny that their new product:

1) Was not doing anything that could be considered black hat.

2) Was providing any SEO benefit for their clients.

The problems you face with projects like this is that Google doesn’t provide enough information, and you cannot post corner-case questions like this in public Webmaster forums. To do so would violate your NDA, and potentially reveal your client’s intellectual property. So, what option do you have left? Well, you set up a honeypot!

A honeypot is a term that comes from the information security industry. Honeypots are a set of files that, to an automated program, appear like regular files, but they allow for the monitoring and “capturing” of specific viruses, e-mail harvesters, etc. In our case, we set up a honeypot with the purpose of detecting and tracking search engine bot behavior in specific circumstances. We also wanted to track the outcome (positive, neutral or negative) in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Let me walk you trough a few ways you can learn advanced SEO by using a honeypot. Read more →

As it is well known by now, Google decided to remove the supplemental label from pages it adds to its supplemental index. That is unfortunate because pages that are labeled this way need some “link lovin’.” How are we going to give those pages the love they need if we are not able to identify them in the first place?

In this post, I want to take a look at some of the alternatives we have to identify supplemental pages. WebmasterWorld has exposed a new query that displays such results, but nobody knows how long it is going to last. Type this into your Google search box: site:hamletbatista.com/& and you’ll see my supplemental pages. I tested it before and after Google removed the label and I'm getting the same pages. Read more →

I’m really enjoying this blogging thing! Every comment I am getting from my readers is a new idea that I feel rushed to put into practice.

My reader, Andrea, mentioned she parses log files to mine for keywords as well. That is an excellent idea.

I decided to put that idea into code and here is a new tool to mine for long tail keywords.

To make really good use of it, I would setup a PPC campaign in Google with a “head keyword” in broad match, bidding at the minimum possible. Make sure your ads maintain good click-through rates (over 0.5%) to avoid getting disabled. Run it for a week or two (preferably more) and you will have a good number of search referrals and “long tail keywords” that people are actually looking for. You can later create good content pages that include those keywords. In most cases, long tail keywords are really easy to rank with on-page optimization only.

I will probably write a Youmoz entry with more detailed instructions on how to take advantage of this. In this way I can get more people to try it and get really valuable feedback.

As I promised to one of my readers, here is the first version of the code to mine log files for linking relationship information.

I named it LinkingHood as the intention is to take link juice from the rich to give to the poor linking sites.

I wrote it in Python for clarity ( I love Python ) . I was working on an advanced approach involving matrices and linear algebra. After reading some of the feedback regarding the article, it gave birth to a new idea. To make it easier to explain, I decided to use a simpler approach . This code would definitely need to be rewritten to use matrices and linear algebraic operations. (More about that in a later post). For scalability to sites with 10,000 or more pages, this is primarily an illustration and does everything in memory. It’s also extremely inefficient in its current form.

I simply used a dictionary of sets. The keys are the internal pages and the sets are the list of links pointing to those pages. I tested it with my tripscan.com log file and included the results of a test-run.

While top website analytics packages offer pretty much anything you might needto find actionable data to improve your site, there are situations where we need to dig deeper to identify vital information.

One of such situations came to light in a post by randfish of Seomoz.org.He writes about the problem with most enterprise-size websites, they have many pages with no or very few incoming links and fewer pages that get a lot of incoming links.He later discusses some approaches to alleviate the problem, suggesting primary linking to link-poor pages from link-rich ones manually,or restructuring the website.I commented that this is a practical situation where one would want to use automation.

Log files are a goldmine of information about your website: links, clicks, search terms, errors, etc…In this case, they can be of great use to identify the pages that are getting a lot of links and the ones that are getting very few.We can later use this information to link from the rich to the poor by manual or automated means.

First we need to parse the entries with a regex to extract the internal pages — between GET and HTTP — and the page that is linking after the server status code and the page size.In this case, after 206 and 1406.

We then create two maps: one for the internal pages — page and page id, and another for the external incoming links – page and page id as well.After that we can create a matrix where we identify the linking relationships between the pages. For example: matrix[23][15] = 1, means there is a link from external page id 15 to internal page id 23.This matrix is commonly known in information retrieval as the adjacency matrix or hyper link matrix.We want an implementation that can be preferably operated from disk in order to be able to scale to millions of link relationships.

Later we can walk the matrix and create reports identifying the link-rich pages, the pages with many link relationships, and the link-poor pages with few link relationships. We can define the threshold at some point (i.e. pages with more or less than 10 incoming links.)